Shopping Centre Sint-Janspoort in Kortrijk, Belgium

At the end of 2008, KAEFER Belgium received a contract to build a complex assembly of scaffolds in the atrium of the mall ‘Sint-Janspoort’ in Kortrijk (B) from its client THV Wijngaard, a temporary business association between the companies Van Roey NV and Van Laere NV. Besides the hiring out, the assembly and disassembly of the scaffolds, the assignment consisted in the design of:

a gigantic floored scaffold for works on the enormous glass dome, this combined with lateral scaffolds, each of 2m of height, for the masonry work at the sidewalls;

the support structures for the heavy steel frames of the glass dome.

The engineering department chose the Scia Engineer software for this project, e.g. for the determination of the reaction forces acting at the bottom of the spindles. Also a few constraints had to be taken into account.

On the one hand, the ground surface (a concrete slab), acting as the base level for the scaffold, could only carry a limited load (a maximum concentrated load of 4 tons) and on the other hand the client insisted on placing the least possible supporting points. An initial investigation already pointed out that the combination of the two constraints was not easily feasible. Only after an intensive period of ‘trial and error’, KAEFER was able to design the ideal structure for the client. In order to come to an optimal spreading over the ground surface of the most heavily loaded points of support, KAEFER chose for a special scaffolding technique which conducted the forces to the underlying concrete slab.

The dimensions of this scaffolding: length: 112m, width: 27.5 m, height: 17m; floor surface of the scaffold: 5.000m ². The 27 support towers with a height of 23m for supporting the huge steel trusses were built in combination with the scaffold, they were however independently charged. The applied vertical force per point of support of these frames was 19 tons. Given the limited size of the support towers (1.57m x 1.57m), special scaffolding constructions were developed to achieve this.